Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Zimbardo's Hero Or Indoctrination Project?

Philip Zimbardo got his start in psychology by doing research financed by the Office of Naval Research, while claiming to be an organizer of Vietnam protests; his latest projects involve encouraging heroism, which sounds very good; however, intentionally or not it distracts from simple solutions that work much better in the long run by preventing extreme situations that might require heroism.

Furthermore, it could also be a part of a widespread efforts to glorify celebrities, or heroes, putting them above reproach, possibly as part of another propaganda campaign to encourage blind obedience to authority, despite claims that his research was designed to do the opposite.

The biggest problem is that glorification of heroism puts the emphasis on saving the day at the last minute in a dramatic fight with the bad guy, without looking at the long term causes of violence and how it escalates from early child abuse and in countries with troubled political system, or abandoned ghettos.

The highest profile cases of "Heroes," as presented by the traditional media, are military veterans who fight one war after another, based on lies from our political leaders, and are portrayed as heroes as long as they blindly obey orders without question. Those that don't go along with the program are often portrayed as cowards for refusing to fight, although they often bravely stand up to those giving them illegal orders. In all fairness, Philip Zimbardo did cite Hugh Thompson Jr. as one of his heroes, for standing up to fellow veterans at Mai Lai and preventing the massacre from being even worse; however even this wouldn't have been necessary if more people recognized that this war was based on lies, like so many others, and prevented it from happening in the first place.

If the public isn't careful they might worship vigilantes at Walmart starting a gun fight over petty theft, or hesitate to question wars based on lies to avoid appearing to criticize glorious veterans who have been led to believe their actions defend our country, when it's actually based on lies about weapons of mass destruction or babies being removed from incubators.

No doubt Philip Zimbardo would clearly say this isn't what he intends at all, however his track record isn't as good as it often seems at first glance, and even if people promoting The Heroic Imagination Project never intended this and provide some degree of caution about this possibility, which I haven't seen yet, the perception about the vast majority of so-called heroes is controlled by the mass media and they might be consulting with psychological research about the subject.

Philip Zimbardo's motives should especially be suspect because as I previously explained in Philip Zimbardo, Lucifer Effect, Stanford Prison Experiment and Eli Roth’s Milgram/Obedience experiment much more extensive than most people realize I suspect he's almost certainly been consulting with the CIA since he first began his career, but even if he isn't he's definitely been tied to the military, by his own admission, which funded his first research project almost fifty years ago.

Attempts to make the majority of the public believe they can be the hero may also be used to indirectly encourage them to admire the heroes presented to them by the mass media, since they might be inclined to worship them the way they might want to be worshiped by others. With Zimbardo's history of exposing some scams while promoting others a closer look at his efforts to promote heroism should be done with a reasonable degree of skepticism, especially since he seem to present oxytocin, as a possible part of the solution, in the following article, which I'll get to more below:

What Makes a Hero? We all have an inner hero, argues Philip Zimbardo. Here's how to find it. 01/18/2011

What makes us good? What makes us evil?

Research has uncovered many answers to the second question: Evil can be fostered by dehumanization, diffusion of responsibility, obedience to authority, unjust systems, group pressure, moral disengagement, and anonymity, to name a few.

But when we ask why people become heroic, research doesn’t yet have an answer. It could be that heroes have more compassion or empathy; maybe there’s a hero gene; maybe it’s because of their levels of oxytocin—research by neuroeconomist Paul Zak has shown that this “love hormone” in the brain increases the likelihood you’ll demonstrate altruism. We don’t know for sure.

I believe that heroism is different than altruism and compassion. For the last five years, my colleagues and I have been exploring the nature and roots of heroism, studying exemplary cases of heroism and surveying thousands of people about their choices to act (or not act) heroically. In that time, we’ve come to define heroism as an activity with several parts.

First, it’s performed in service to others in need—whether that’s a person, group, or community—or in defense of certain ideals. Second, it’s engaged in voluntarily, even in military contexts, as heroism remains an act that goes beyond something required by military duty. Third, a heroic act is one performed with recognition of possible risks and costs, be they to one’s physical health or personal reputation, in which the actor is willing to accept anticipated sacrifice. Finally, it is performed without external gain anticipated at the time of the act.

Simply put, then, the key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward.

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Take the Holocaust. Christians who helped Jews were in the same situation as other civilians who helped imprison or kill Jews, or ignored their suffering. The situation provided the impetus to act heroically or malevolently. Why did some people choose one path or the other?

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Some people argue humans are born good or born bad; I think that’s nonsense. We are all born with this tremendous capacity to be anything, and we get shaped by our circumstances—by the family or the culture or the time period in which we happen to grow up, which are accidents of birth; whether we grow up in a war zone versus peace; if we grow up in poverty rather than prosperity.

George Bernard Shaw captured this point in the preface to his great play “Major Barbara”: “Every reasonable man and woman is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man is depends upon his character what’s inside. What he does and what we think of what he does depends on upon his circumstances.”

So each of us may possess the capacity to do terrible things. But we also posses an inner hero; if stirred to action, that inner hero is capable of performing tremendous goodness for others.

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Opportunity matters. Most acts of heroism occur in urban areas, where there are more people and more people in need. You’re not going to be a hero if you live in the suburbs. No shit happens in the suburbs!

Education matters. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be a hero, I think because you are more aware of situations.

Volunteering matters. One third of all the sample who were heroes also had volunteered significantly, up to 59 hours a week.

Gender matters. Males reported performing acts of heroism more than females. I think this is because women tend not to regard a lot of their heroic actions as heroic. It’s just what they think they’re supposed to do for their family or a friend.

Race matters. Blacks were eight times more likely than whites to qualify as heroes. We think that’s in part due to the rate of opportunity. (In our next survey, we’re going to track responses by area code to see if in fact these heroes are coming from inner cities.

Personal history matters. Having survived a disaster or personal trauma makes you three times more likely to be a hero and a volunteer.

Based on these insights into heroism, we’ve put together a toolkit for potential heroes, especially young heroes in training, who already have opportunities to act heroically when they’re kids, such as by opposing bullying.

A first step is to take the “hero pledge,” a public declaration on our website that says you’re willing to be a hero in waiting. It’s a pledge “to act when confronted with a situation where I feel something is wrong,” “to develop my heroic abilities,” and “to believe in the heroic capacities within myself and others, so I can build and refine them.”

You can also take our four-week “Hero Challenge” mini-course online to help you develop your heroic muscles. The challenge may not require you to do anything heroic, but it’s training you to be heroic. And we offer more rigorous, research-based education and training programs for middle and high schools, corporations, and the millitary that make people aware of the social factors that produce passivity, inspire them to take positive civic action, and encourage the skills needed to consistently translate heroic impulses into action.

We’re also in the process of creating an Encyclopedia of Heroes, a collection of hero stories from all over the world. Not just all the classic ones and fictional ones, but ones that people from around the world are going to send in, so they can nominate ordinary heroes with a picture and a story. It will be searchable, so you can find heroes by age, gender, city and country. These are the unsung, quiet heroes—they do their own thing, put themselves in danger, defend a moral cause, help someone in need. And we want to highlight them. We want them to be inspirational to other people just like them.

Essentially, we’re trying to build the social habits of heroes, to build a focus on the other, shifting away from the “me” and toward the “we.” As the poet John Donne wrote: “No man [or woman] is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

So every person is part of humanity. Each person’s pulse is part of humanity’s heartbeat. Heroes circulate the life force of goodness in our veins. And what the world needs now is more heroes—you. It’s time to take action against evil. Complete article

Encouraging heroism "knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward," may seem like a good idea, but it's actually promoting conflicting ideas. This is the type of image often created and encouraged by mythology or Hollywood but rarely if ever happens in the real world. Altruism is admirable and worth encouraging but promoting the image of a dramatic hero that will be worshiped when he comes in and saves the day by preventing someone from shooting up the place or doing something else dramatic isn't the most effective way of doing this. And the people that think it is are almost certainly more concerned about fame and glory than solving problems in the most effective manner.

Efforts to solve the biggest problems in our society almost always don't involve dramatic events but finding the long term causes for the problems and preventing them. This could be portrayed as heroic but it almost never involves daring or high risk, instead it often involved tedious efforts to educated the public or develop an fair economic system that prevents many of our social problems. It may also involve exposing epidemic levels of fraud by our own government and the corporations that prevent some of the most effective research to solve these problems from being reported in the media that creates an enormous amount of hype for the people they want to present to the public as heroic.

Zimbardo states "You’re not going to be a hero if you live in the suburbs. No shit happens in the suburbs," clearly implying that his impression of heroism is something dramatic where there might be a need to a fight to save someones life at the hands of a violent thief or gang member, or if that's not what he intended to imply it's virtually guaranteed that that's the impression many people watching a lot of action films might come to. In the short term there may be some incidents where actions like James Shaw Jr. took at the Tennessee Waffle-house to disarm a gunman can save the day, but they're not the most effective manner of doing it, and they come at extreme risk and can often do more harm than good which is why police more familiar with failed attempts routinely recommend against this action if there's any other option.

Wouldn't it have been much better if someone intervened by teaching Travis Reinking's parents better parenting skills that enabled him to avoid his troubled past that contributed to his shooting rampage? I don't know more than most people about his past but there are, as usual, some signs that he came from a troubled background and a further investigation will almost certainly fill in more details. There may not be enough research into Reinking's past to determine the exact causes leading to his violent behavior; but there's plenty of research available that shows children abused at a young age are more likely to grow up violently and this could be used to change child rearing tactics for many.

More practical solutions that aren't likely to seem nearly as dramatic or heroic, although efforts have been made to make them seem that way, are much more more mundane, like teaching about how early child abuse and bullying leads to escalating violence later in life. It may also involve political activity to fix the broken political and economic system that we live in especially in abandoned inner cities with high rates of violence like Nashville, which is more than twice the national average. I've gone into the leading causes of violence in numerous other articles, but one of the most important things is that they need to increase funding for education, and provide more economic opportunities everywhere, including these abandoned inner cities, which is constantly the opposite of what the entire political establishment is trying to do either with outsourcing sending jobs over sears or the school reform movement transferring control of the education system to Charters, often for profit, controlled by economists, politicians and public relations people looking out for the best interests of the rich elites, instead of experienced educators or well informed grassroots activists.

Philip Zimbardo is correct that children should be encouraged to do their part to oppose bullying, however, in order to be most effective perhaps it should be done in the least dramatic manner, which might seem heroic, possible, by talking things out, or working with the community to provide more adult supervision when dealing with this problem advising kids, which includes more teachers and smaller class sizes, the opposite of what the political establishment is pushing.

However, even though Philip Zimbardo is right about some things like teaching children to oppose bullying, his past research should raise major alarms, especially when he ignores some of the most effective and least dramatic solutions to many problems and presents Oxytocin as a potential part of the solution, instead of a drug that should be handled with extreme caution if it's used at all. This is especially important since, although the vast majority of the public isn't aware of it, it could potentially be related to some of the interlocking research projects that included Zimbardo's so-called "Stanford Prison Experiment," Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiments MKULTRA and numerous other research experiments that the CIA was almost certainly involved in.

To this day there has been no official admission that the obedience to authority and prison experiment were part of interlocking experiments on mind-control like MKULTRA; however the government has admitted that they did experiment with drugs and other methods as part of the MKULTRA experiments to control people and as I explained in my past articles about Milgram's and Zimbardo's experiments, it's virtually guaranteed that these are related. Most of the details are in those articles including research by professors, Alfred McCoy and Philip Greven among other sources to come to my conclusions, but one of the simplest things to understand is that the Navy, which supported both Milgram's and Zimbardo's research isn't in the business of teaching their recruits to question authority, which is what the experiments were supposedly designed to do.

The Navy and other military branches are in the business of teaching their cadets to blindly obey orders without question, which is the opposite of what the official explanation for the experiments claims they were for, and that is almost certainly the real purpose for these experiments, to develop more effecting boot camp indoctrination tactics!

Research has shown that oxytocin, which Zimbardo presents as a possible solution to make people more heroic, makes people more susceptible to advertising, which is a form of propaganda. This is the kind of drug that the people involved in MKULTRA would have been interested in since it appears to be as effective if not more effective than most of the drugs they experimented with when it comes to mind control.

There is little or no effort to inform the vast majority of the public about the potential for psychological manipulation this drug might have, yet in the academic world there's an enormous amount of research on it. After reading about it in a few books that only mentioned it briefly and checking a few more articles that aren't hard to find once you look for them it should be clear that this should be treated with extreme caution if it's used at all.

It would seem like a fringe conspiracy theory to most people to speculate about the possibility that oxytocin is being used for mind control purposes, especially if it's presented as the sole contributing factor, which is almost completely out of the question. However, there is plenty of research from mainstream academics, who are not generally considered conspiracy theorists, to indicate that this might be a real possibility, especially if it's combined with other more credible research about indoctrination from an early age through coercive child rearing methods like use of corporal punishment or other forms of intimidation and appeals to emotion, as I went into more in several previous articles including Dobson’s Indoctrination Machine, which relied primarily on traditional academic research.

Furthermore, many so-called fringe conspiracy theories about the CIA in the past have repeatedly proven to be either partly or completely true, so it would be foolish to completely rule out the possibility that the CIA might be experimenting with oxytocin. Considering the interrogation tactics that the CIA and military have been exposed participating it shouldn't be considered fringe to speculate, as one of the articles listed below does that oxytocin "Could Become New Interrogation Tool."

In a book by Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" 2011 he writes, "Half the participants inhaled a nasal spray containing oxytocin, which can penetrate from the nose to the brain, and the other half inhaled a placebo. The ones who got the oxytocin turned over more of their money to the stranger, and the media had a field day with fantasies of car dealers misting the hormone through their showroom ventilating systems to snooker innocent customers." This may have been presented as a joke but it's a serious possibility that should be considered; advertisers and political activists have been caught at stranger things.

The CIA has also been rumored to have studies cult activity and try to influence elections, both at home and abroad, even though it's illegal to do so, the most famous proven case in the United States is of course, the Watergate hotel break in. Now that the official version of truth is routinely more insane than many so-called fringe conspiracy theories, it's not unreasonable to speculate about the possibility that they might be experimenting with efforts to encourage cult support of candidates, which could include Donald Trump and his absurd followers that seem to believe he's going to "Drain the Swamp."

If this sounds like an absurd fringe conspiracy theory to you, I agree, it is absurd and fringe; however the official version of truth is just as absurd and accepting this as the new normal could lead to the decline of the last shreds of our democracy. There's no doubt that something absurd if going on the trick is to figure out what it is, so we shouldn't rule this possibility in or out without further evidence!

Also, efforts to glorify heroism could also be used as a psychological manipulation tactic since people tend to worship dramatic heroes and if anyone challenges that they might face a lot of social backlash, like the worship of politicians religious leaders and celebrities. Anyone familiar with the media should realize this isn't just a theory, there's enough evidence to conclude that it's routine if you look for it. The hype surrounding the highest profile heroes is almost always controlled by the mass media which makes their money by selling deceptive advertisements to convince consumers to buy all kinds of things they don't need.

In a growing trend the media has been referring to people who try to stop petty thefts at Walmart as "Good Samaritans" even when they resort to activities that could be considered extreme or lead to excessive violence over a minor incident including one example of "petty theft" which led to a confrontation where the person trying to stop him attempted to slash his tires and the shoplifter rammed the victims truck and another example where a bystander showed his gun permit badge in an attempt to intimidate another shoplifter attempting to steal a TV he said might have been worth less than a hundred dollars.

These stories are just a small fraction of the problems Walmart has with violence, and as I went into more in several articles including, Wal-Mart’s crime problem, Rolling Back Safety more than prices? many of them involve vigilantism, which often turns out much worse than either of these two incidents. They've had cases where attempts to steal sand paper or underwear have escalating to shootings, or a theft of a 59 cent dounut led to a severe beating by a police officer, other cases where people have been killed in shootouts and many cases where they have had criminal charges for excessive use of force, in some cases against innocent people, including an example just last month where a Georgia police officer was sentenced to five years in jail for falsely accusing someone of stealing a tomato and beating him so bad he had to be hospitalized.

In addition to that Walmart has had enormous problems with people stealing their gun=s which are often not secured properly, which I doubt that Parkland moms are aware of otherwise they might think twice before advertising for Walmart, which is what they seem to be doing according to Here's why Parkland moms want you to 'shop in' at Walmart, Dick's this Mother's Day weekend 05/11/2018, in return for raising the age of purchase to twenty-one. This is a trivial policy change which isn't likely to have much if any impact at all, especially when they ignore the vast majority of other contributing causes as I have gone into in previous articles including solutions about Walmart's crime problems discussed in the article about "Rolling Back Safety more than Prices" and a recent article about Marketing Failed Solutions To Shootings for Profit? Or Propaganda? which also points out that the marketing industry which is controlling the "March for Our Lives" campaign seems more interested in selling T-shirts and focusing on only one contributing cause, gun control, which almost certainly is part of the solution, but not the only part, or the most important part of the solution.

Heroism may sound good, and in a few rare cases it is; however the most practical solutions to most problems isn't dramatic at all; it often involves slow tedious research and setting up educational systems to inform the public about how to avoid contributing causes of violence. A large portion of this involves increasing funds to education and child care especially in abandoned inner cities. This may seem difficult as many pundits often point out; however they rarely think it's hard to find money for wars based on lies or prisons that have been proven not to work!

There's good reason to be skeptical of the effectiveness of these hero worshiping projects, especially when they ignore the most effective research to prevent violence from escalating, starting at an early age, by preventing child abuse, or by funding schools more.